“I don’t think I can improve it, unless I add another sort of flower that seems appropriate:  may I?”

“Any thing you can find.”

Christie waited for no more, but ran out of the greenhouse to David’s great surprise, and presently came hurrying back with a handful of snow-drops.

“Those are just what I wanted, but I didn’t know the little dears were up yet!  You shall put them in, and I know they will suggest what you hope to these poor people,” he said approvingly, as he placed the box before her, and stood by watching her adjust the little sheaf of pale flowers tied up with a blade of grass.  She added a frail fern or two, and did give just the graceful touch here and there which would speak to the mother’s gore heart of the tender thought some one had taken for her dead darling.

The box was sent away, and Christie went on with her work, but that little task performed together seemed to have made them friends; and, while David tied up several grand bouquets at the same table, they talked as if the strangeness was fast melting away from their short acquaintance.

Christie’s own manners were so simple that simplicity in others always put her at her ease:  kindness soon banished her reserve, and the desire to show that she was grateful for it helped her to please.  David’s bluntness was of such a gentle sort that she soon got used to it, and found it a pleasant contrast to the polite insincerity so common.  He was as frank and friendly as a boy, yet had a certain paternal way with him which rather annoyed her at first, and made her feel as if he thought her a mere girl, while she was very sure he could not be but a year or two older than herself.

“I’d rather he’d be masterful, and order me about,” she thought, still rather regretting the “blighted being” she had not found.

In spite of this she spent a pleasant afternoon, sitting in that sunny place, handling flowers, asking questions about them, and getting the sort of answers she liked; not dry botanical names and facts, but all the delicate traits, curious habits, and poetical romances of the sweet things, as if the speaker knew and loved them as friends, not merely valued them as merchandise.

They had just finished when the great dog came bouncing in with a basket in his mouth.

“Mother wants eggs:  will you come to the barn and get them?  Hay is wholesome, and you can feed the doves if you like,” said David, leading the way with Bran rioting about him.

“Why don’t he offer to put up a swing for me, or get me a doll?  It’s the pinafore that deceives him.  Never mind:  I rather like it after all,” thought Christie; but she left the apron behind her, and followed with the most dignified air.

It did not last long, however, for the sights and sounds that greeted her, carried her back to the days of egg-hunting in Uncle Enos’s big barn; and, before she knew it, she was rustling through the hay mows, talking to the cow and receiving the attentions of Bran with a satisfaction it was impossible to conceal.